


Red-Eyed

by montparnasse



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-21
Updated: 2014-05-21
Packaged: 2018-01-26 00:29:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1668083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>These seats go <em>all</em> the way back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red-Eyed

**Author's Note:**

> I know what you're thinking: "omg she has no idea how a shuttle should work and this is just a cheap excuse for car sex!"
> 
> And you know what? You can keep thinking it, lovely. Because you would be right.

Shepard has always had this _thing_. This thing for speed.

Running before she could even walk, the barrel of a gun, the battering-ram Mako, the crackling churning throttling light-year arc of a Mass Relay—it all goes a long way toward explaining why she’s here, now, propelling this bullet of a shuttle up a cliff and around the jagged teeth of a mountain on some God-forsaken planet where they were outnumbered, outgunned, and the only thing left to do now—the only thing left to do now is outrun.

“Faster,” Jacob is saying. She slams the accelerator onto the floorboard like a kiss and listens to the wind hiss and break around them, rapid breaths, rapid blood in throats.

If she looks out the window—and she _does_ , just for the thrill of it, just for the freefall-surge of blood—she can see the ocean, can hear the ragged gasp of gravity crying out for them like a lover shoved up against the rocks. One wrong twitch of the wheel, one single hitch of breath, and they tumble down into the belly of the beast.

“Faster,” Jacob says, again, and his fingers are gripping Shepard’s knee, his eyes on the path that could by stretch and generosity be called a road. “Now. _Faster_. Or are you just playing?”

“Never,” she says, and swallows, and hisses, and he does not clamp down on that lie because it’s always a little better if they pretend they might not make it, if they pretend these silly little boys have any chance at all and they’re not going to be dead or lost or eaten by the rocks in the span of a few raw breaths. She jerks the wheel too hard and loses control for one single heartbeat. Pretend it’s on purpose. Pretend it’s not.

A bullet snaps by and she senses it more than she hears it; Jacob’s fingers are inside her thigh, curling around her, fisting in her skin, hot hot hot with promise. “God, _faster_ ,” he mutters, and that’s it, that’s all it takes, she’s jamming the accelerator down and crushing the wheel as hard as it will turn in her hands; she can hear the gravel fly, feels more than sees the other shuttle careening down the dagger-boned jut of mountain, tastes the salt and the sweat and the coppery choke of tension, and right as the road curves up and away Shepard slams her foot down on the brake just as hard as she’d hit the gas pedal.

Five seconds. Four, if you don’t count the single breath that never swells in her chest.

Jacob Taylor has already unbuckled his seat belt and Shepard is in his lap before their eyes even meet, before he has drawn a full breath for the first time in half an hour. She flips the seat all the way back, too fast _too fast_ but he’s laughing, both of them high on adrenaline and altitude, all skin, rhythm of breath, rhythm of blood.

“Want to know a secret,” Shepard whispers. Jacob’s hands are on her waist, warm, calloused palms rasping up her sides and her back, slow and reverent like they haven’t done this a hundred times before.

“I dragged all those out ages ago,” he says, low storm-rumble of his voice coiling velvet-smooth deep inside her, “unless you’re going to tell me you’re actually a VI and I really don’t want to know if you are.”

The clink of his belt, hiss of his breath when she takes him in her hand and feels him getting hard and harder, teeth at her collar, lips on her breasts. She arches into his hands and lets out a breath, never enough, speeding closer and closer to each other. “It’s an _important_ secret,” she says. His hands are heavy on her hips and she shifts so he can tug them off, says, “I secretly really love this,” and his palm cups her, strokes over her clit, and she sighs when he pushes a finger inside her, rocking into it like a livewire and never looking away from his face, not once, not for her life.

“That’s not a secret.” Jacob’s eyes are on hers always, his mouth moving like waves with the steady stroke of her hand. “Twenty-seven times and it stops being a secret.”

“You kept track.”

“I’m a very meticulous man,” he says, and Shepard swallows his grin, swallows his groan when she shifts her hips down to meet him and he thrusts up inside her, his hands gripping her thighs, her hips.

“The secret,” she gasps, and, God, yes, _there_ , “is actually, it’s in the thing I didn’t say.”

“And—because I’m a meticulous man—God, _Shepard_ ,” his hips moving with hers, erratic-electric flow of skin and heat filling her up, his hands on her back, on her waist, pure liquid desire beneath her, “I already know what you really love is me. Us. All, all that.”

“Such a quick study,” she says, and he pulls her down to kiss her again, his mouth wet and sharp like the sickle of the crescent moon, saying _faster, faster, ah, God, faster_. Faster and faster until they’re mad with it, skin slick with sweat, no such thing as brakes now, the needle nudged into the red, and God, fuck, that’s it, the sweet sonic boom, the hot jangle of their limbs, the spark and then the rapid rush spilling and melting and dissolving inside her, in her belly, spreading down her whole body. Her mouth is open on his and her fingers clench on his arms, tight and tense with just a raw rasp of voice, it's pulsing in her blood until Jacob cups her head to his shoulder, grinding up into her and panting hard into her neck, fluid roll of hips and bodies, and when he comes she presses her mouth into his jaw, _yes, yes_ , quiet tangled decrescendo of blood and heat and gravity.

They’re breathing then, just breathing, wild and fast, and then they’re laughing the way they always do, Jacob’s arms around her, pulling her down, still inside her. “Shove over, you,” she says, her thighs and forehead wet and cooling as she presses into him like she doesn’t know how tall he is, how tall they both are. She can feel his heartbeat, still frantic in his veins, and she loves it like this, loves him and this and _them_ , the way she can close her eyes and feel the weight of him there like a wall, like certainty. They flow beside each other, rhythm of the river curving, shaping, surrendering. There is nothing like this, the still after the rush, Jacob’s fingers in her hair; they could do this forever, the race and the thrill and the frenetic-soft crash of bodies and words and breathing. The rest of the world is insignificant; anything could be happening outside this shuttle right now and she wouldn't care at all.

“You know, I’m a meticulous woman, myself,” she tells him, feels the rumble of laughter shake through her own skin. He’s so practical, so brilliant, so _sensible_ when nothing else ever is. She wants to fall into him. “So meticulous, in fact, that I think I’m going to take you home to my mother, and then we’re going to get married, and then we’re going to lie in bed on Nos Astra all the livelong day and drink Asari champagne. The end.”

“I don’t think you know what meticulous means,” he murmurs against her throat, warm and wet, “and I think I’d rather see Paris. You know Nos Astra makes me all wiggly.”

“You know they'll feed us to the wolves if we do this in France. Too many eyes. Not enough vroom vroom.”

“That’s why we’ll find ourselves a vacation home right in Blue Suns territory,” he says, "where your mother doesn’t have to bail us out for breaking every traffic law on Earth and public indecency. Win-win. And all that.”

“ _So_ meticulous,” she whispers. “How fast do you think we can drive this fine lady back?”

“Thirty-two minutes up here. Twenty minutes down, and I’d bet my whole life,” he says, thumbing her cheekbones, his mouth gone soft. “Shepard.”

“I know, love,” she says, “I always have.”

All in good time, and they’ll do this again; all in good time, and the risk and the thrill and the comfort and the sex become ritual just like the strained breath and the thump of an accelerator. For now, she has her hair hanging damp down past her shoulders and her name like a charm on his lips; for now, she has the metronome of their pulses, just waiting for another detonation, faster, faster, _faster_.


End file.
